


How to Tie a Bowtie

by de_Clare



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, FTM Buffy, Genderqueer, Is it het or slash or just queer?, M/M, Other, Trans, Trans Buffy, Trans Character, Transgender, bowties are cool
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 10:49:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4663806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_Clare/pseuds/de_Clare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giles gives Buffy some masculine sartorial advice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Tie a Bowtie

**Author's Note:**

> A/N 1: Set in Season 6. Giles still has his old digs because it's impossible to offload real estate in Sunnydale.
> 
> A/N 2: Choice of pronouns is deliberate because it's based on Giles' perception.

After her resurrection, she changed. She clipped her hair into a pompadour and took to wearing Spike’s clothes. Surprisingly, she was quite suited to dark jeans and cotton shirts. However, the outsized garments accentuated her petitness. Trousers that hugged every crevice of Spike’s quadriceps drowned her figure and required deep cuffing at the ankle, which was probably a hazard for slaying. I intuited that something more significant than a shift in her sartorial mood was taking place, but it’s not my place to pass judgment. Anyway, she’s certainly not inviting commentary.

It’s only when the two of us are studying volumes in parallel in my sitting room, me on my chair and Buffy in an impossibly flexible full lotus on the couch experimenting with an oversized bowtie over an open but untouched volume on aura cleansing that I decide to intervene.

“Why can’t bowties just tie like shoelaces? You know, the two bunny ears approach?” she whines, prising open a tight knot in the centre.

“I learned the around the tree approach as a child.”

Finally loosening the knot, Buffy takes the two ends of the tie, which is ghastly blue-and-black plaid polyester, and attempts to loop the bow ends into ears.

“Too short,” she grunts. “What’s this ‘out of your tree’ approach?”

I must be smiling because she glares at me. “May I?” I ask politely.

She passes the tie across the coffee table, so I turn up my collar and loop it around my neck.

“What are those?”

“I’m sorry,” I feel around my lymph nodes suddenly worried that a growth is protruding from my neck. Demonic ailments don’t worry me, but the organic body plays the traitor later in life.

“Those white things in your shirt,” she stands before me and points at the base of my collar.

“These? They’re collar stays.” I slide one out and she looks unaccountably skeptical.

“They look like fangs.”

“Here,” I place one in the palm of her strong but suddenly lithe-looking hand. Perhaps it’s the masculine red shirt descending too far down her wrist. It’s strange how contrasts work like that.

She inspects it, poking the end to her finger. “Not a fang. And who is Alfani?”

“The man who owns the sweatshops, I imagine. They come with the shirt. I have a whole jar of them on the dresser.”

“Cool, so you can glue them together and make little collar stay houses. Can I put it back in? I promise I won’t stab you.”

Tilting my head back I say, “You’d have to stab fairly hard. They’re only plastic. Now if I were posh, they’d be metal.”

“Or wood?”

“Not that I’ve seen, but I don’t see why not.”

“Maybe you could stash stakes like that…if you met a vamp who was six inches tall.” She pokes around helplessly with the collar stay until it finally slots into place. It’s only then that I smell the residual cigarettes and mustiness on her clothes. She’s smelled of the grave before, but always as a kind of intrusion soon corrected, as she would assert, with scrupulous showering. It’s nothing significant really, but I can’t help but worry that she’s picking up bad habits from Spike.

“Is this one of those father-son moments?” she asks, breaking the silence.

“Would you like it to be?” I reply, intuition sprinting ahead of any conscious thoughts.

She ducks her head and shakes it fractionally, “So you were going to show me this Boo Radley tree knot approach.”

“Right. You hang one end lower than the other.”

“Like a scrotum?”

I must look aghast because she giggles, but I press on. “Then you loop the long end around the short, throwing the long end jauntily over your shoulder. And with the short end form the backing.”

“Wow, you can just do that? Fold it so that it looks like a bow?”

“Yes. Now watch me. You loop the loose end around the middle of the backing—this is the tricky part—“

“This is the first tricky part?” she looks despairing.

“You make a loop, then you put your finger inside it and giggle like an adolescent.”

“You stole my joke,” she pouts. “You strangled it in its cradle before it had a chance at life. Is that why they call you Ripper?”

“I think they would call me “Strangler” in that case. But watch—you pull the corner through and tighten both ends.”

“It looks messy.”

“It’s supposed to. That lets people know that you’ve tied it yourself.”

“But clip-ons are predictably perfect.”

“Yes, and you’ve always held that predictability is a virtue.”

“Got any more zingers, Mr. Camp?”

“Yes, it’s time for the test.” I loosen the tie and she looks absolutely crestfallen.

“You didn’t say there’d be a test.”

I pass her the tie. With a long-suffering sigh, she pops her collar and loops it around her neck. “So first there’s the danglers. They seem danglier than a minute ago.”

Indeed, the electric blue is hanging overlong and mismatched over the red cotton nearly to her navel.

“Sorry, I should have adjusted the neck size. It only goes down to fifteen, I’m afraid. Let me fetch a smaller one.”

I open the hall closet and select a black and mauve silk tie that retracts to thirteen and would look less objectionably mode-ish.

“Come here, I’ll show you.”

She stands before the mirror on the closet door and I reach around her shoulders. Her eyes follow my fingers and I notice from this rare vantage point that the short blended hair at the nape of her neck looks so cleanly clipped. Tactile. There’s something primally vulnerable about that area, the part that reminds us that we’re all potentially prey animals.

I tighten the ends of the tie which, sitting assertively at her throat, looks quite fetching. It’s strange, how small but significant shifts in her appearance change my perception of her, even after six years. Where she’s always looked the powerful young woman to me, now she’s the flower of unblemished masculine youth, a strange mixture of experience and casual adolescent defiance in her posture. And I’m uncomfortably recalling Basil Hallward and the exposition to Dorian Gray.

“Giles?”

“Sorry, miles away. Are you ready to try yourself?”

“No. Can’t you just do it for me every day? I’d take you for walks and give you cookies.”

I pull one end and it neatly unravels.

“Hey—“ she turns around with the two ends hanging down her chest, but the words retreat and we're left with too-exposed mutual stares. I remember drinks after formal hall at Oxford. When beautiful young men with pretensions to power smoked roll-ups, loosened black ties hanging jauntily over their crisp white shirts. Even now I remember my fantasy of one hand holding another and textured cuffs meeting audibly at the wrists.

Something just askew clicks into alignment. I’ve never desired her, first because she’s my student, but also I suppose, and I can see how I’m old fashioned in this, she didn’t map onto my own pre-conceived desires. I wanted my men to be men and my women to be women. But now, extraordinarily, when I see her as a boy, she looks the part of a poised young man. And the inspection is apparently mutual, because she’s regarding me with that merciless discerning and I wonder what kind of dissonance she perceives in my own masculinity.

She lifts her hand, hesitates, then touches the crinkles at the corner of my eye.

“Why do men become rakishly handsome and women just get old?” she asks, hand dropping. I know that she’s asking a different question from a vantage point that I don’t fully understand, so I answer as honestly as possible.

“I can’t pretend to know how cultures produce their norms, but I think it’s because women are judged based on their beauty and men are judged based on their ability to provide. Age perhaps means experience.” I remember feminists at the Union from my university days and hope I haven’t done them such a terrible disservice.

“Do you feel experienced?” She shifts into my space and it feels strange not to touch.

“Sometimes,” I begin, thinking suddenly of her muscles, the solidity and softness of her body. Contradictions, but all embodied and therefore persistently real. “Sometimes I feel completely out of my depth.”

“Me too,” she says, with such fragility that I pull her close to me, relieved to dissipate this physical tension somehow, but pressed against me, she kisses the flesh where my collar opens at my throat. I know her too well to protest or make admonitions, so I lean down and kiss her temple, the spikiness where her hair is clipped close to the scalp.

Not one to yield, she leverages her weight against me so that I’m pressed against a framed Georgian print that’s poised to crack as she kisses my cheek, the divot below my nose and lips, not like a man or woman in any familiar sense, but like a cartographer.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she whispers against my mouth.

“You’re a beautiful boy,” I say, quite honestly.

“Thank you.”


End file.
